The Favorites (18 page)

O
ne
day Sarah noticed that her grandmother had bought more roasted eels than the two of them could eat.

“Do you want me to take some over to Auntie’s?” she asked.

“No, no. There isn’t enough for everyone in that house. This isn’t cheap, you know.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “The extra portion’s for your auntie’s anemia. What I do,
ne,
is flag her down sometimes when she passes by the kitchen door. I sneak her in for a quick bite, and no one’s the wiser. Or sometimes I give her liver—you know, the kind I always make for you with ginger and soy sauce. Of course it’s a secret.”

This was the first Sarah had heard of her grandmother keeping secrets with anyone but her mother and herself.

A few days later, when she complimented her grandmother on the miniature rosebush in the garden, she learned it had been a gift from Mrs. Nishimura.

“Oh…” She was puzzled. The two houses sometimes exchanged cuttings, but never brand-new plants from the nursery. That had been Mrs. Rexford’s style—many times, after one of her outings, she would come home saying, “Mother, look!” and holding out a pot of bluebells or fragrant jasmine.

“Oh,” Sarah said again. “Well, that was really nice of her.”

It occurred to her that her mother’s name had been coming up in conversation much less than it used to.

One night the two women were sitting at the
kotatsu
in the family room. The
kotatsu
was a small low table with an electric heater attached to its underside, and a heavy quilted cover that extended down to the floor and covered their laps. Like most traditional homes in this neighborhood, the Kobayashi house had no central heating. One stayed warm by huddling around a
kotatsu
while chatting or watching television. Sometimes, since it was just the two of them, Mrs. Kobayashi and Sarah ate their meals there as well.

“You two had a
spat
?” Sarah was saying. “You’re joking!”

“It was completely one-sided,” Mrs. Kobayashi said. “We were talking on the phone about something…I can’t even remember what…then all of a sudden, she got upset and said, ‘You never wanted me anyway!’ And she hung up.”

“What!”

“I know! I couldn’t believe my ears. She’s never said anything like that in her entire life.”

“So what happened?”

“I rushed over there. I didn’t even stop to think. I just knew I could never live with myself if I didn’t make it right. I said to her, ‘I’ve done a terrible thing to you.’ God knows where Granny was that whole time! And I told her, ‘There hasn’t been a day in all these years I haven’t regretted it.’” Mrs. Kobayashi nodded, her eyes watering at the memory. “It was surreal, like jumping off a cliff. But you know how much I’ve always wanted to tell her that.”

“I know.” Sarah remembered her grandmother saying to her mother, “I wish I
knew
if deep down, behind that face, she’s all right. I wonder if deep down, she hates me.”

“Your aunt was such a reserved girl,” Mrs. Kobayashi said now. “There was that coolness about her, not like your mother or your aunt Tama. But now she’s starting to blossom. Little by little, she’s turning into the person she was always meant to be.”

“Really? I hadn’t noticed.”

“Well, it might be something only a mother notices.”

Just then, someone tapped on the kitchen door.

“Who could that be, so late?” Mrs. Kobayashi murmured.

It was Yashiko on her way home from her college prep session. She couldn’t stay, she told them. She had brought a box of piping-hot octopus balls, a classic cold-weather snack. “Mother said to pick these up for Aunt Mama,” she said, referring to the tradition of offering the deceased’s favorite foods at the family altar. “I have to run—I’m late for dinner!”

This was typical of Mrs. Nishimura’s thoughtfulness. She remembered little things, like how her big sister used to eat these octopus balls standing up like a man, in front of the vendor cart with its red cotton flaps. Even now, on winter nights, that same old-fashioned cart set up shop in the same place: the sidewalk next to the vermilion gateposts of Umeya Shrine. Octopus balls were a nighttime commodity, geared toward college students or salarymen on their way home from work. Since Mrs. Kobayashi never ventured out after sunset and discouraged Sarah from doing so as well, Mrs. Nishimura’s gesture was doubly considerate.

After Yashiko hurried home to her dinner, Mrs. Kobayashi carried the box directly to the altar. She lit the incense, struck the gong, and with a good-humored “Eat up, Yo-chan!” placed the Styrofoam box on the slide-out shelf beneath the altar. Then the two women, having finished their own dinner several hours ago, sat back down at the
kotatsu.
After a suitable amount of time, Sarah got up and retrieved the box from the altar. The con
tents were still hot. The balls of dough were generously studded with octopus chunks, green onions, and pickled red ginger; their tops were drizzled with savory sauce and dried bonito flakes and green seaweed powder. Mrs. Kobayashi took one but ate only half. “You have a young person’s digestion, so you might as well eat it all,” she said, pushing the box toward Sarah. “They’ll be no good once they get cold.”

Sarah began working her way through the octopus balls, spearing them one by one with a toothpick. “So why now, do you think?” she asked, returning to their earlier conversation.

“
Saa
…who knows? Strange things happen to women in middle age. Emotions rise up from quiet places. They realize life is short, and it makes them act differently.”

They were silent.

“Can I tell you something?” Having broached this subject, her grandmother seemed eager to keep on talking. “A few years back—right before your grandpa had his heart attack—we ran into each other at the open-air market. She introduced me to someone she knew. And you know what she said?” Mrs. Kobayashi paused dramatically. “She said, ‘This is my mother.’”

Sarah speared another octopus ball and said nothing.

“She said, ‘This is my mother,’” Mrs. Kobayashi repeated. “As cool as a cucumber, right in public. She said, ‘This is my mother.’”

Sarah looked up and saw her grandmother’s face transformed with happiness and wonderment. Something about that expression reminded her of her own mother, long ago, when they had held hands.

“I never thought I’d live to see it!” Mrs. Kobayashi said. “She was always such a cool little girl, she could never say what she felt…and there she was, saying, ‘This is my mother.’ Right in public.”

Sarah’s vague unease now funneled into a sinking feeling in her stomach. She didn’t fully understand it, but its physical effect was real.

“I’m glad for you both,” she said gently. “It’s very lovely, almost like a romance.”

“I know, don’t you think so? Listen to this. On Mother’s Day I found a little bouquet of hand-picked violets in the milk delivery box. There wasn’t any note. But I knew it was her.”

“Well,” said Sarah, “I guess it’s a good thing Auntie doesn’t hate you after all.” She took a hard pleasure in being so direct. Then she was instantly ashamed of herself.

But her grandmother didn’t seem to notice. “I’m sure her feelings are complicated. But it’s the start of something, don’t you think? It’s more than I ever expected.”

Sarah nodded, pulling her legs out from under the heated quilt. “Let me go snuff out that incense,” she said, “before I forget.”

She walked over to the altar. She stood there for a moment, looking at the aged, indecipherable tablets and at her mother’s tablet, still brand-new. She was reminded of her early childhood when she would stand in this very spot, sulking or feeling sorry for herself after some imagined slight. She remembered how she had consoled herself by peering into this alternate world, inhaling the odor of incense and thinking fiercely that dead people were nicer than the living.

After a while she snuffed out the incense sticks and swung shut the black lacquered panels for the night. For the first time in years, she sensed her mother was gone—truly, finally gone.

N
ow
that Mrs. Kobayashi belonged to the ranks of the elderly, she patronized the bathhouse as soon as it opened: 3:30
P.M.
on the dot. The other old women in the neighborhood were just as punctual. If they arrived even an hour or two later—Sarah remembered this from her own childhood—the clientele would be completely different. There would be young housewives. There would be small children with flushed faces, immersed in the scalding water bearable only to a Japanese adult, their treble voices counting to one hundred as fast as they could go.

Within this group of old-timers, Mrs. Rexford’s legacy lived on. Naked, dripping women still sighed by way of a conversation opener, “Such a pity,
ne
—”

Sarah, seated on a plastic stool, was washing her grandmother’s back. Proper etiquette required a person to be fully scrubbed and rinsed before entering a communal bath.

“
Ara,
how nice,” said a bent old woman, pattering past on her way to the bathing area.

Sarah and her grandmother, still seated, smiled and returned her half-bow.

She resumed her gentle soaping. At first, she had often pretended it was her mother’s back she was washing. It had eased her ache to give her grandmother the tenderness she had never given her mother. Even now, she couldn’t forgive herself for the way she had acted as a child.

After their summer in Japan, things had improved. It wasn’t noticeable at first, for their closeness fell away in America. But as the months passed, that indefinable chemical change within Sarah asserted itself. She still struggled with her mother for freedoms and privileges, but their arguments weren’t as frequent or as personal. For Sarah had seen her mother at her strongest and most admired, and her mother knew she had.

Their arguments became less about Sarah wanting to fit in with her peers, and more about her wanting to try new experiences—something that her mother could understand. Over time, her outsider anxiety dropped away altogether, giving her much more in common with her mother. This took years, of course, and Mrs. Rexford didn’t live to see the full effect. But before her death there had been the start of a true womanly friendship between them. For the first time, Sarah had looked into the future and seen the full-fledged bond theirs would become.

She knew this now: her relationship with her mother hadn’t been a bad one. But back then, the only yardstick they had was the closeness between her mother and her grandmother. It was a source of regret for Sarah, as she knew it had been for her mother, than they hadn’t been able to replicate it.

“Look!” said Mrs. Kobayashi. She was pointing down at their feet on the tiles. “You and I have the same toes.” It was true; the first three toes of Mrs. Kobayashi’s feet were all the same length, just like Sarah’s.

“
Maa,
she takes after her grandma!” a nearby bather com
mented kindly. It touched Sarah to think of her grandmother eyeing her body so discreetly, so hopefully, searching for the smallest of connections.

They rinsed under the showerhead, then walked over to the bathing area. The enormous tub took up the entire room; through the heavy steam, they could glimpse several heads rising from the surface of the turquoise water. Echoes bounced off the high domed ceiling. On the other side of the tall dividing wall, they could hear the occasional burst of male voices.

They straddled the side of the pool-like tub and stepped into the steaming water. Gritting her teeth to keep from yelping, Sarah descended the steps until the hot water was up to her neck.

“Aaa…,”
sighed Mrs. Kobayashi, holding a soaked washcloth up to her cheek in order to absorb even more heat. “Nothing feels more luxurious than soaking in an old-fashioned communal bath.”

“Isn’t that the truth, madam,” agreed a woman several meters away. “Those new houses with the baths added on, they have such tiny little tubs. There’s no way you can get the water truly
hot,
like it is here.”

“One of my daughters lives in a house with a private tub,” Mrs. Kobayashi told her. “She’s never bathed here, even though she passes by every day on her way to the market. Such a pity. I often think how much she’d enjoy it here.”

Sarah felt a flash of anger. This was her mother’s special place, not her aunt’s. With a queer feeling in her stomach, she remembered how loyal her mother had been, as loyal as Benkei.
Don’t you dare hurt my mother,
she had said. And she had cried…

Now an unfamiliar woman, treading water with her hands, made her way over to Mrs. Kobayashi. “This must be Yo-chan’s daughter?” She turned to Sarah, her face flushed from the heat.
“Your mother,” she said, “used to light up a room. She was so full of life.”

“Thank you,” Sarah replied. Gratitude welled up, making her voice unsteady. “It’s so kind of you to remember.”

“And this one here’s becoming more and more like her mother,” Mrs. Kobayashi told the woman. “Sometimes I almost forget who I’m talking to.”

The woman nodded and beamed with approval. Sarah, somewhat mollified, smiled back modestly.

Her grandmother was correct, to a certain extent. Sarah had adopted many of the social mannerisms that had endeared her mother to the public—her habit of clapping once when she had a bright idea, or her sunny demeanor and facility for easy chatter. She had internalized her mother’s attitude of taking others’ approval for granted. It hadn’t come easily. She had blurred their identities, as she had once learned to waltz by standing on her grandfather’s feet. No one was going to call
her
a blancmange pudding.

Yet there was a difference: these qualities were learned, whereas in her mother they had been instinctive. Sarah knew, and realized her grandmother knew, that she would never have the true spark of the original.